Posted
by
kdawsonon Friday August 08, 2008 @10:46AM
from the pull-dammit dept.

CheshireCatCO writes "When Cassini makes its closest approach (50 km) during the flyby of the moon Enceladus next Monday 11 August, the spacecraft will be zipping by too quickly to turn and image in the usual way. So the Cassini team will be trying something new: a 'skeet-shoot' of the surface. The spacecraft will start to spin before the closest approach to the south pole so that when the best resolution is possible, the moon will drift through the field of view slowly enough to acquire unsmeared images. Of interest are the eruption-sites on the surface that give rise to the plume extending thousands of kilometers into space and producing Saturn's E ring. This flyby will be optimized for the imaging instruments (ISS, VIMS, CIRS, and UVS) in contrast with the March flyby, which was designed for the fields-and-particles instruments."

So I assume they don't wanna slow down once they're moving cuz that'd waste energy and take more energy to get going again and that's the whole problem here. So what happens when it wants to go through the McDonalds drive through on Pluto? (yeah there's one there) Nobody can make a burger that fast!

That's like calling saying "Don Quixote rode her ass" and not expecting people to be thinking he just did the nasty with some windmill operator's daughter. We're filthy, immature creatures who never grew out of chuckling when you hear homo erectus. Take the classic riddle: What's a four-letter word for a woman ending in "unt?"

Someone once told me that the military used a similar trick in the cameras used for low-level, high-speed reconnaissance in Vietnam. The pilot would overfly his target at tree-top level, to avoid enemy anti-aircraft fire. The camera had to compensate for the apparent motion of the target.

Deconvolutions are generally iffy under any but the most ideal of circumstances, in my experience. With the point-spread function being what it is (complicated, that's what), we're not in the best of circumstances, either.

I actually meant the intrinsic PSF for the camera, which is somewhat complicated as it turns out. We've actually considered de-blurring before, but I don't think we had a lot of luck with it and it didn't seem worth it. I can recall trying to deconvolve Enceladus's bright limb with the PSF before and having that turn out awfully. For these, considering the speed, I think that de-blurring would be neigh impossible.

(It's also worth noting that we're aiming for science-class images here and not so just pub

Why should a tiny portion of taxpayer money go to something like this when we could spend billions of dollars on much more worthwhile endeavors, like building a while along our southern border, or bombing developing countries based on bad intelligence? It's an outrage that this country is willing to pour a fraction of a percent of total governmental funding into such a useless program. What good ever came of peaceful exploration and the research and development to make it all possible?